Yesterday was October 26, 2009 and this was supposed to be the last day that my GeoCities site will be accessible because, today, GeoCities will be closing forever. I'd been gearing up for this day ever since I first read about GeoCities' impending closure around June of this year.
It was extremely disturbing for me since, not only was my GeoCities site ranked highly for a few search terms in Google but any page linked to it would also rank highly in search results of Google and, given my situation at work, it seemed that I wouldn't have the time to look for an alternate site and implement forwarding so that the new site will be listed in search engines instead of the GeoCities site. Doing this would preserve my website's ranking in search results.
However, good thing I found the time when I resigned from my job. I took the opportunity of having more time to develop my websites and my primary goals were to move my main website from GeoCities to SourceForge and preserve its search engine ranking and what is commonly called, "link juice".
I'm hoping that my efforts to preserve my website's ranking have been successful. I've been patiently waiting for the closure and for my GeoCities pages to be inaccessible so that I could finally determine if I was able to maintain the ranking of my website. If my GeoCities website is still accessible after today, I'll be really pissed because after all the pronouncements of Yahoo and all my preparations and the waiting, the closure date wasn't followed.
Yahoo is offering a "promo" of $5 a month to migrate from GeoCities to Yahoo Hosting. Yahoo will forward visitors from the old url to the new one.
I can't pay this price. $2 is the maximum I can shell out. What Yahoo should have done is offer site redirection for $1 a month. For $2 a month, redirection can be per page instead of per site so that each page will forward to a different site. The bandwidth costs of redirection wouldn't be as high as for hosting.
My earliest surviving email addresses are from Yahoo. I chose GeoCities for my first website because Yahoo bought GeoCities in 1999 and they were providing free websites for Yahoo users. It was very simple. I already had Yahoo accounts so it was very easy to setup a GeoCities website under my account. No need to sign up.
It's hard for me not to get nostalgic or sentimental. My GeoCities website at www.geocities.com/almirantes was my very first one. It hosted the very first software that I released to the public. It hosted my resume and through this, I was able to land one job. It also hosted the very first technical article that I've written and released on the web.
I created my GeoCities website on September 12, 2001 and it lasted for over 8 years. It was updated semi-regularly until the last few months when I made my final edits to forward users to the new site at testguru.sourceforge.net and almirante.users.sourceforge.net. You don't see too many websites that were maintained or have lasted for that long.
I will really miss GeoCities, not only because of my website, but also because of all the useful information that was hosted there. I hope that, in keeping with the spirit of the parent site of this blog, all these useful content will still be preserved for future use.
I'm hoping that my efforts to preserve my website's ranking have been successful. I've been patiently waiting for the closure and for my GeoCities pages to be inaccessible so that I could finally determine if I was able to maintain the ranking of my website. If my GeoCities website is still accessible after today, I'll be really pissed because after all the pronouncements of Yahoo and all my preparations and the waiting, the closure date wasn't followed.
Yahoo is offering a "promo" of $5 a month to migrate from GeoCities to Yahoo Hosting. Yahoo will forward visitors from the old url to the new one.
I can't pay this price. $2 is the maximum I can shell out. What Yahoo should have done is offer site redirection for $1 a month. For $2 a month, redirection can be per page instead of per site so that each page will forward to a different site. The bandwidth costs of redirection wouldn't be as high as for hosting.
My earliest surviving email addresses are from Yahoo. I chose GeoCities for my first website because Yahoo bought GeoCities in 1999 and they were providing free websites for Yahoo users. It was very simple. I already had Yahoo accounts so it was very easy to setup a GeoCities website under my account. No need to sign up.
It's hard for me not to get nostalgic or sentimental. My GeoCities website at www.geocities.com/almirantes was my very first one. It hosted the very first software that I released to the public. It hosted my resume and through this, I was able to land one job. It also hosted the very first technical article that I've written and released on the web.
I created my GeoCities website on September 12, 2001 and it lasted for over 8 years. It was updated semi-regularly until the last few months when I made my final edits to forward users to the new site at testguru.sourceforge.net and almirante.users.sourceforge.net. You don't see too many websites that were maintained or have lasted for that long.
I will really miss GeoCities, not only because of my website, but also because of all the useful information that was hosted there. I hope that, in keeping with the spirit of the parent site of this blog, all these useful content will still be preserved for future use.
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